


The Good Times are Killing Me

by Reginald_Magpie



Category: Magic School Bus, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alcohol, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, Brothers, Canon Gay Character, Canon LGBTQ Male Character, Character Study, Chronic Illness, Class Issues, College, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Crushes, Drug Use, Family, Female Character of Color, First Crush, First Kiss, First Meetings, Friendship, Growing Up, Growing Up Together, High School, Inspired by Music, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Character of Color, LGBTQ Female Character, M/M, Male Character of Color, Mental Health Issues, Middle School, Minor Character Death, Music, Nonbinary Character, POV Alternating, POV Character of Color, POV Minor Character, POV Multiple, POV Queer Character, POV Third Person, Personal Growth, Queer Families, Queer Themes, Queer Youth, School Dances, Science Experiments, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Underage Drinking, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 22:06:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1444561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reginald_Magpie/pseuds/Reginald_Magpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follow one Carlos Ramon, cosmic underachiever and happily ignorant kid, as well as his little brittle brother, Mikey, and the rest of the people who swim in and out of their focus through the years that they grow up in. Starting in sixth grade, the chamomile's sweet in Rhode Island, but the dramas told behind school doors are sour and one can't help but wonder about it all. Why he's here, why the dog he finds likes him, why anyone would, why the boys who he meets in hospitals have eyes more alive than all the ones he passes in the hall, and why the hell him wanting to smoke a cigarette or two and kiss boys might make his father upset. </p><p>To put it simply, it's just a saga. Just novella upon novella that chronicles Carlos Ramon's life post-magic school bus, and how surviving the natural world is just as hard as surviving the supernatural one that bus took him to. And who knows? Maybe he'll stumble back into it all again. If he can manage to get through alive, that is.</p><p>INDEFINITE HIATUS</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Good News For People Who Love Bad News

The summer chamomile is dying off in the tiny parkway off Willow and Delaney but the air hangs heavy with its scent. It holds in the dying light of the summer sun with a certain grace that almost makes Carlos rethink his resentment of the first day of school for cutting his vacation short. Sixth grade has come with the looming drumbeats of the horrifying land of “Middle School” but this morning is making the half hour til he actually needs to be at school feel like it’s stretching on forever in a golden half-awake state.

Mikey’s behind him in the void between the way way back seats and the front seats where there would normally just be the “back seats”. He’s shrugged over a video game with his hood up, and Carlos looks at him when the van lurches slowly to a halt, Mikey drops his game and Carlos meets his eyes with a little smile, a little ‘good luck’. Mikey’s going into fifth grade today, a year younger than Carlos, and until next year, he’s still stuck at Walkerville Elementary. Carlos scrambles out to open Mikey’s door and make sure the ramp sets out right.

The van is a modified ‘99 Honda they bought used with some savings they’d managed to scrounge together. It falls silent once Mikey’s wheeled safely to a teacher who will help him inside and Carlos's shoved the toes of his scuffed red high tops into the corner where the footmat meets the base of the dashboard again, has the door slammed, his seatbelt buckled into place.

He’s still holding onto summer, hoping school won’t go how it did last year, hardly being able to imagine it will be ten times worse.

The sun has risen enough to catch the top windows of Matthew Perry Middle School, a two story structure done in 1899 red brick which had faded and crumbled a bit from its previous sprawling splendor. Light had not yet reached the three fourths enclosed front lawn that nestled between the frontfacing wings of the school building, where four large, but not necessarily pretty, weeping willows spread their leaves to brush the ground. They stand grey and green against the yellowing grass.

There’s a throng of students and parents, all made up in ‘first day of school’ outfits, curls and makeup and clothes in place. Carlos himself worried endlessly about his outfit this morning before struggling into a ratty pair of tried and true blue jeans with a bill nye t-shirt he’d had since fourth grade, and had just recently realized he’d grown into, and his ‘back to school clothes’ red plaid hoodie. But what had made him feel a little shiny in the mirror this morning makes him feel underdressed and outclassed. This is a feeling that will stalk Carlos, and a few of the others, through ‘first day of school’s well into his twenties.  

His mouth feels dry as he climbs out of the passenger seat. He waves goodbye after assuring his father he’ll be fine and no he does not actually need any assistance he’s a big kid now remember. He says it all in the joking tone he and his father always take with each other. Sometimes Carlos feels it’s becoming a tiny bit of a barrier between them, but maybe that’s the hormones.

His footfalls are quick as he moves through the groups of students who are greeting old friends and making new. He fishes his schedule out of his pocket and unfolds it, nervously searching down his locker number and then pulling aside the tallest girl he sees, a redhead he doesn’t recognize but who looks old enough to know her way around.

“Do you know where uhh… the 722 locker might be?” She shrugs, and apologizes but her friend, a short african american girl with striking light eyes, points him upstairs to the west wing, where the sixth grade lockers are. He chirps a thank you to both of them and bobs his head, then darts in between the clustered students and teachers in the hallways to the stairway and up it. He catches his breath on a landing between the first and second floor where there’s a flyer for robotics club up on the wall, rereads his locker and his schedule and checks his start time against the time now; he’s good. He scoots up the stairs, eyes still open for anyone he recognizes from last year, from Walkerville Elementary. He sees no one familiar, which makes sense; this is a big school.

Finding his locker without incident, Carlos lowers himself to his knees so he can get to it, since it’s the lower one of two. He looks at his combination, and then at the circular lock, and back. He can feel the barrier in his brain, and the confusion and frustration with it threatening gentle at the corners of his head. He brings his forehead into his locker as he realizes that he actually doesn’t have a clue how to open a locker. His dark hair hangs in his eyes as he pulls his head away from his locker and begins to stand up, hoisting his backpack over his shoulder again. Might as well take all his stuff to class then. As he turns to head to his first class, which he’s pretty sure is just down the hall, he almost runs into Wanda.

Wanda Li has known Carlos since second grade and she stands a little taller than him after a summer’s growth between fifth and sixth grade. Her dark hair pools just past her strong shoulders and her dark eyes are smiling and, like last time he saw her, he doesn’t really know how to feel about her. Not in a romantic way, more in a “I don’t know if I enjoy spending time with you but I always seem to when I’m actually with you” way. She makes him nervous in theory but is comfortable in practice.

He smiles when he sees her though because she means familiarity and familiarity feels nice in this overwhelming sea of new sights and smells.

“Hey Carlos,” she chirps and he grins in return, hugging her.

“Hey Wanda, you wouldn’t happen to know how to open lockers or anything? I just don’t know what the key to unlocking them is.”

She stares at him completely nonplussed, then steals his schedule from his fingertips and smooths it against the locker above his. Wanda then leans down and twists the dial of the lock to input his combination before sliding her finger up into the release bit. His empty locker swings open and Carlos sighs in relief.

He drops his backpack into his locker and removes three notebooks, a pack of pencils, and a pack of pens. Piling them on top of one another, he gathers the stack into his arms before closing his locker door, just in time to step back and let Wanda flatten his schedule out on the locker on top of his again.

“We’ve got science and social studies together. Awesome!” She adjusts her shoulder bag around her collarbone and pulls his schedule away again, handing it back to him with a confidently extended arm. Carlos is looking at the paper to figure out which periods those are when he hears Dorothy Ann’s voice. Half a shiver runs through his diaphragm and he scowls, his lip twitching slightly.

“Would you two get out of my way? I need to put some of my books in my locker so I don’t hurt my knees carrying them around in these shoes. Move over!”

Wanda scowls hard at DA but steps toward Carlos and the two of them look at each other, exchange the same knowing look of tiniest growing disgust, and then nod and part, going their opposite ways in the hall to their first periods.

Carlos crosses back from the west wing to the main wing where his English class is supposed to be. The door is open, and Carlos looks inside to find what looks reasonably like an English classroom; some noun/adjective/verb posters and twenty desks or so, half occupied.  Figuring he’s found the place he’s supposed to be, Carlos slides in and drops his backpack on the chair behind a desk in the very back of the classroom, next to the wilting spider plant the english teacher has all but forgotten.

The only person he recognizes in the classroom sits at the front left corner, her bookbag stowed carefully under her chair, notebooks and a wide array of different coloured pens sitting on her desk neatly arranged. Phoebe Terese runs a hand through her auburn hair, careful to avoid the daffodil yellow barrette situated above and in front of her left ear. Carlos watches with a tiny smile as he drops his own books on the desk he’s chosen.

“Pheebs,” he calls over the quiet hubbub of the  chatting students and her head jerks up and away from her hand as she looks around. Her eyes find him in his seat and she waves at him to come join her in the front. He shakes his head fiercely and she sighs in exasperation, picking up her bag and books and hauling it all awkwardly to flop into the seat next to him. She smells like an aisle in the grocery store but Carlos can’t put his finger on which one.

“Hello, Carlos,” she says, and he smiles, returning her greeting.

“Have you seen anyone you recognize from Walkerville yet?”

Phoebe shakes her head, “No one besides a couple kids from Mr. Fiore’s class last year, so no one you and I know. I think I might have seen Keesha and Avery somewhere though. But I didn’t say hi. This place is huge! There are so many people here!”

“My dad says there are tons of feeder schools for Matthew Perry Middle School, not just Walkerville so maybe that’s where all these kids are from.”

Phoebe is opening her mouth to respond when the teacher clears her throat.

She is a forgettable woman with dark hair and dark eyes, both brown bordering on black like Carlos’ own, but she has lighter skin than Carlos and a nose much more angular. He thinks she must be middle eastern in descent or something but he hasn't actually ever seen anyone who's definitely middle eastern so he can't tell for sure. She stands, revealing a pencil skirt and blouse as her choice of wear. Carlos decides he doesn’t like her already. She seems boring and strict. Cut of too many hard angles in a distinctly unappealing way.

Mrs. Sponcible turns out to be boring and strict in such a fantastic manner that Carlos realizes by the time the clock over her desk is reaching the end of class that he absolutely despises his homeroom teacher and this will be a very, very bad year. He writes this on a small scrap of notebook paper and passes this to Phoebe in note form. As the bell rings for next period, she just rolls her eyes at him, then says.

“What do you have next?”

“Social studies, with Wanda I guess.”

Phoebe laments in having gym next and they go their separate ways.

Mr. Shi, the social studies teacher, sits them in groups of four that are his random combinations of two each of student-chosen partners. Wanda and Carlos are partners simply out of not knowing anyone else around them, and they’re partnered randomly with two blonde girls; one much taller than either Wanda or Carlos and very slim, and one who looks older than all of them and wears lipstick and eyeliner but stands shorter than Wanda and taller than Carlos. The tall skinny one, they learn, is named Maddison, and the one wearing lipstick Emma.

Carlos feels scared and outnumbered through the groupmaking activity that takes place in the first period of his first sixth grade social studies class with Mr Shi. He’s happy to quietly escape the estrogen of his group (with a quick goodbye to Wanda) after the bell and dart through the crowded hallways back up the west wing to his theatre classroom.

Carlos isn’t exactly sure why he’d picked theatre besides not really caring to take any other offered electives and also maybe the fact that Mikey and his father had laughed about him becoming a comedic theatre genius over the dinner table while he stared over Mikey’s shoulder  to the fridge. His eyes found where the bottom corner met the black speckled white linoleum floor of the kitchen connected to the dining room and the faded fridge magnets just above it. He nodded along, smiling just the tiniest bit. Only Mikey noticed. So he'd milked it. If anyone knows Carlos, it's Mikey.

Carlos so happens to be the third one into the classroom. The first, presumably, was the theatre teacher, a woman wearing a teal vest and skirt covered in tiny teal feathers over a white cotton blouse and boots worthy of hiking the Rockies on her delicate legs. All of her is delicate, she looks not a year over twenty-eight with long brown hair that waves but hardly curls. It’s cut short,and she wears a necklace and garishly huge earrings and for some reason this doesn’t startle Carlos in the slightest he just nods her a hello. The second, however, is a blonde girl he recognizes sitting in the corner.

Carlos does not recognize this girl from his last period because this is DA, staring at him with baby blue eyes and those terrible twin tails and something twists in Carlos’ intestine and he swears inside his head.

He sits a few seats away from her, his brown eyes not leaving her and his fingers drumming on his as of yet unused notebook. This is how Theatre passes, also in group getting to know you activities and absolutely no use of notebooks or pens or pencils or the things schools usually used any other day, but not the first day.

For a good portion of the supposed lesson, Carlos gazes out the window at the courtyard filling with light slowly and illuminating the slim silver leaves of the weeping willows, they shine like airborne minnows and he smiles at them dreamily before flicking his gaze to DA, who's busily taking down notes.

Peering over he sees she's divided her notebook page into two sections with a line and she's writing names on the left side of the line and comments about the person on the right. He can't see his own name so he raises his hand and asks to be excused to the bathroom. Walking by, he hazards DA's paper a glance, but there's nothing written by his name, he sighs in a mix of relief and disappointment.

Carlos slinks out the door with a measured feeling in his chest, not really sure why he wanted a bathroom break besides to get out of the classroom. He doesn't go to the bathroom, instead he walks a line down the main hall of this wing. His shoes scuff rubber on the white tile floor and he can't help but want it to be lunch already.

It doesn't take long for Carlos to get to lunch, though, which is nice. He doesn't really want to go to the cafeteria; he knows it'll be packed and noisy and he knows that this year he's allowed to go outside for lunch, his dad told him that. He does linger in the hall, though, hoping to find Wanda or Phoebe again.

Keesha and Phoebe are together when Carlos finds them; Keesha wearing a black and purple ensemble a great deal more modest than most of what the girls in this school are wearing todday, and with her hair tied in a loose ponytail. They're talking about who they met in their first classes when Carlos joins them on their own way outside.

"I have Tim and Wanda with me first period. Math. I hope Tim can help me, I did so badly at math last year. Wanda seems to be doing pretty good though," Keesha's saying as he walks up.

"I've got Wanda for second period," Carlos chips in, "And Pheebs and I are together in first. But guess who I've got theatre with! Same person as has the locker above mine."

"Lemme guess," Keesha says, "Dorothy Ann. I saw her in the hall today, she glared somethin' fierce, you know?"

"I'm just glad she stopped talking to us after a while," Phoebe mumbles.

The three friends fall into something of a hushed silence as they find their seats outside in the sun in the yard between the main wing and the sidewings.

"So has anyone seen Arnold? Ralphie's in my gym class so he's definitely here this year," Phoebe asks, and now that he thinks about it Carlos was kind of wondering the same thing and he shakes his head in time with Keesha.

"I don't have a clue," Keesha says.

Lunch is spent in relative peace under the weeping willows on the front lawn, catching up on one another's summers. Keesha spent the summer travelling around with her mother for science magazine stuff and Phoebe mostly lazed around in the library. Carlos tunes out while the girls giggle about some boy Phoebe met at said library and he finds himself watching the leaves of the willows sway in the breeze. No one else joins them for lunch today.  

Carlos ends up having math with Ralphie in fourth period after lunch. Their teacher is Mrs. Ranier, who reminds the boys of a bear, and who wears her weight heavy around her stomach and thighs while adorning herself in brightly coloured girl sweaters and friendship bracelets. Carlos would like her if she were less ridiculous and less girly but as it stands he does not.

He also quickly decides he does not like Ralphie anymore even though he's agreed to be in the same math group and do work with him for the rest of the year. Carlos begins to feel like he should regret the decision when Ralphie's only conversation points seem to be about his baseball games and how cool he is. Not that all people who play baseball and think they're cool are necessarily bad in his mind, it's just that Ralphie's being kind of mean about it.

For the last half of the class, Ralphie passes notes to Carlos about whether or not any of the girls they know have boyfriends, which they don't, none of their friends have started dating yet. Carlos doesn't really understand why it's so important to have a girlfriend or whatever but he humors Ralphie all the same. If only for old time's sake. He keeps a cocked half smile for his old friend through the entire written conversation. Maybe he's not as good as Mikey at reading people and their emotions but Ralphie seems at ease. Which is only slightly upsetting in how unappealing his attitude's becoming when he's at ease. Like disrespect and harm are courtesy.

Science is Carlos' fifth period and he can't help but be just a little excited for it. Science always seems to be the class he can breeze through and totally enjoy at the same time. He's excited to meet his teacher.

It turns out Tim is in this class too, but he sits at a table alone in the back and Carlos is dragged away by Wanda before he can point Tim out to her so they end up pairing with a boy named Ryan and a girl named Jennifer. Ryan is a tall, skinny redhead who's wearing a hat that sinks down low over his eyes, and Jennifer is taller than Wanda by an inch or so with curling black hair and dark brown skin. Jennifer has a nice smile, Carlos thinks idly, but he doesn't really have any opinion on Ryan at all.

Their science teacher is a man by the name of Mr. Taur. He's a grizzled gray man of sixty at least with an overhanging belly and a scraggling beard that clings to his face a bit like ivy. The front of his desk is draped in Indiana Jones posters and around the walls of the classroom are maps, each denoted with scientific remarks.

For the first time all day, Carlos likes his classroom and likes his teacher from the first moment of laying eyes on them. This hasn't happened since third grade, not that that was too terribly long ago. This doesn't feel as special as that did, though, walking into school on the first day and beholding the Frizz, red ringlets bouncing around her ears while Liz skittered between her shoulder and wrist, her fingers set on a book about asteroids.

Later, in journals and stories, Carlos will describe his first sight of the Frizz as her having her fingers on the galaxy. Perhaps that's right, perhaps an exaggeration, but Mr. Taur does not by any means actually seem cosmic like Ms. Frizzle did that first day.

That aside, though, the man seems nice, and fatherly in a certain way, Spanish by origin and accent and friendly by design. And what's more, not only does Carlos like him but so does Wanda which means something big for Carlos' enjoyment of the class for the rest of the year; he won't have to listen to Wanda cursing and whining about a bad teacher like he might with Mr. Shi's social studies.

Still, in the vein of the rest of the scramble that seems to be the first day of school at a middle school, Carlos' first science class goes on with very little science and much more explanation of the vague ideas they'll be covering this year. By the end of the period, Carlos does note however that Mr Taur seems invested in the furthering of his student's scientific education and more specifically Carlos' scientific education, something Carlos admires ceaselessly.

Wanda likes Mr. Taur less. She says he's old and stuffy and he won't make science any fun. Science has been about having fun to Wanda since at least fourth grade.

By the last period of the day, the clouds have moved in over Rhode Island bay and Matthew Perry Middle school grows dark under overcast grey sky and a young, timid spattering of rain.

Carlos knew Walkerville gym class, that was easy, forty five minutes of playing games in the gymnasium with forty to a hundred other screaming elementary schoolers. That was simple in its chaosity, but now as he steps into the large gym that smells like rubber and rain seeping through the windows, Carlos can't help but be intimidated. The gymnasium is huge, and looks new enough to have been built or renovated last year. It rests on the ground level of the east wing of the school, and is currently full of thirty-five sixth graders; including Keesha, Arnold, Avery, and Wanda, who are grouped closely together sitting along the circle that the other students are also sitting on printed into the hard floor.

The three of them met Avery in fifth grade, he transferred down to Rhode Island from Maine when his mother started working out on the bay. He and Keesha are close, but he and Arnold are closer. He, Arnold, and Keesha seemed to become their own little threesome out of the familiar group of fifth graders and other grades from Walkerville. Carlos likes them all well enough. None of them seem particularly pleased when their gym teacher makes an entrance.

Mr. Shun is a burly man of forty-nine and he carries his center of balance low, he wears a grey shirt and blue shorts and a whistle around his neck and he looks like everything Carlos has ever feared in gym teachers built into one impressive 6’3” man.

The boys are herded to the boys’ locker room, the girls to the girls’ locker room, and Carlos feels the anxiety begin to well in his stomach that he sees plain on Arnold’s face. Avery looks unphased, chatting with a tall dark skinned sixth grader he seems to know but who Carlos can’t recognize.

After a long moment of chatting and waiting for Mr. Shun to show up in the locker room give them directions, Avery introduces Carlos to Adam, who’s also apparently a new friend of Arnold and Avery’s. This makes all of their alliterative naming even more confusing and Carlos doesn’t like it but he doesn’t have time to comment because Mr. Shun walks through the door to the locker room before Carlos has a chance.

Then they’re being fitted for gym uniforms and Carlos feels a little sick because as confident as he seems this is just a little outside of his comfort zone and he doesn’t really understand why they need to wear uniforms for gym if they don’t have to wear them for any other classes and he says as much to Mr. Shun.

This is his first mistake with his gym teacher of many, and it earns him a glare, and a quick “because that’s how things work, son”. Carlos knows he’s gotten on his teacher’s bad side and he winces a little. He feels a little anger and resentment for the teacher swell at the back of his throat and everything feels hot until he’s changing out of his gym clothes into his regular ones again. All while hissing insults about Mr. Shun with Arnold, who doesn’t like him either. Carlos has the sneaking suspicion that Arnold very rarely likes people in general, which makes him feel a tiny bit better about himself for still even being in contact even after all these years, although he can hardly call their vague infrequent interaction as of last year and the summer that ‘friendly’.

All of the Friz’ class have grown apart to some extent, at least with Carlos and mostly each other. Wanda’s Carlos’ closest friend and closest friend from the time period by far, but she and DA can’t even really stand to be in the same room together anymore. Carlos and Arnold haven’t so much fought as slowly drifted, the same with Carlos and Keesha, as well as most of them and Tim. At the end of the day when Wanda, Keesha, Avery, Carlos, Arnold, and Ralphie come together to measure the familiar faces they’ve seen and those they haven’t, they discover it seems Phoebe’s met up with some friends from her old school, and Tim’s falling in with some other kids who are interested in artistic pursuits. DA’s found company with a group of seventh grade girls who she shares advanced math and music classes with.

So the group of six say their goodbyes on the first day of school and count their losses. Middle school hasn’t had so many casualties yet.


	2. Nothing Was Broken, Nothing Was Hurt

Carlos’ daily life lives on a slowly revolving tilt unrelated to the earth’s axis. When he gets home he goes up to his room and begins devising a name for it because he felt the tilt of it very strong today.

Finally, he settles, after an hour of doodling and deliberately ignoring his homework of getting his father’s signature on the various papers he and using up six pages out of two notebooks he was supposed to use in school today, on the General Relativity Lazy Suzan of Carlos Ramon. It’s affected, he’s pretty sure, by the general relativity of everyone around him and all their stupid drama bullshit.

Carlos decides middle school has given him a dirty mouth and shakes his head as if that’ll rid him of it. After a few dawdling minutes, he ventures downstairs to the kitchen, saying hello to his dad, who’s making dinner, and then grabbing the home phone on the island on the counter.

“Who are you calling?” his father asks, jovial as always.

“Wanda,” Carlos says as he punches in the number.

Wanda’s mother picks up and Carlos smiles politely into the receiver as if she can see him. His father immediately knows her mother has picked up from his son’s body language.

“Oh, hello Mrs. Li,” Carlos says. Wanda’s mother hands the phone to her daughter after the receiver relays a number of heavy footsteps and a vague yelling. An out of breath Wanda takes hold of the receiver.

“Sorry, William was being a brat,” she says, then stops to tell her mother that no, she’s not sorry for calling Will a brat.

Carlos relays his thoughts on the General Relativity Lazy Suzan and Wanda mmhms through him and then tells him how her day went for school and how everything is shaping up Li.

Carlos eats the turkey posole his father made with a smile on his face, even though his father’s making turkey puns the entire way through. Mikey laughs extra.

The next few days fall into mostly the same mold; Carlos goes to school, but first goes with his father to drop Mikey off at Walkerville. He mostly stays in the car and watches Ms. Frizzle’s school bus bumble away to itself in the parking lot. Then he winds his way through the willows in the entryway of the school, dawdles to homeroom where he sits with Phoebe and a friend from her old school; Henry, a boy taller than both Phoebe and Carlos who has a dark mass of hair and prominent eyebrows, he’s very quiet. Then Carlos heads to Social Studies, and he and Wanda begin a project with Emma and Madison involving Lewis and Clark that Carlos does the drawings for because he’s the best artist out of the group; something discovered through a little drawing competition they diverged into when divvying up roles. He draws rivers and indians a lot but doesn’t pay much attention. Then he goes to theatre where he sits a little closer and closer to DA each day but even when, by the first friday of the school year, he’s sitting in the desk next to hers, she pointedly ignores him. Lunch is spent with the gang of six more or less, with a drifter or two visiting on the sunnier days to their spot on the stairs outside, and with a member or two less on the overcast days. Then Carlos suffers through math with Ranier and Ralphie and the horrid sixth grade math text book, a trio he feels he’ll be dreading all year. Fifth period is Carlos and Wanda leaning in to watch Mr. Taur spill passion for volcanoes and ecosystems at the front of the classroom with rapt attention. They’re keenly aware of the details and take notes to show him extra effort in the class. He gives them both extra credit the first week. Sixth period is gym, dreaded and uncomfortable and spent usually trying to put Wanda and Keesha between him and Adam and Avery, or at least Arnold, if he’s feeling low enough to sacrifice the freckled kid to the cause. He dodges DA at his locker as often as possible and they don’t say a word to one another. After school he goes home and does homework or watches TV with Mikey and calls Wanda before dinner. He says hello to her mother on the phone and then speaks to Wanda about the day before. He has dinner and hangs out with Mikey in Mikey’s room on the main floor, which is bigger than Carlos’ by about three times but they use it as a playroom the both of them so he doesn’t mind. Then he goes to bed and the process repeats. The first week will set the mold for this year. And the next (perhaps ongoing).

Carlos spends his first weekend on homework and playing video games with Mikey on the xbox. He calls Wanda once on Sunday evening.  The green couch is his primary habitat and his diet consists mostly of cheerios from the pantry, dry or with 2% milk from the fridge. Mikey follows suit. They stage a brotherhood couch in. Carlos’ smile doesn’t fade all weekend.

“Is Wanda your girlfriend?” Mikey asks Monday morning on the way to school. Carlos does a double take and feels a defensiveness rise in his throat. He feels fortress walls in the making slowly forming at the barriers of his psyche.

“No,” he says, glaring at the windshield. His father laughs.

“The lady doth protest too much,” his father says. Carlos seethes at the window and then complains to Phoebe in first period about his dumb dad never taking him seriously. Mrs. Sponcible is particularly mean today.

By mistake or design, Carlos runs into Phoebe on his way to eat lunch with his usual group, and by some strange happening, she decides to follow him out. He smiles a little when she sits her dark pink lunchbox down by Arnold and adjusts his glasses for him before sitting down on the step beside him.

“Hey Pheebs,” Wanda says.

“Yeah, hello Phoebe,” Arnold says with a smile waiting to bubble under his lips, a glimpse of tooth. Phoebe greets everyone quietly and for a moment she melts into the group seamlessly. This moment stretches with the dying summer sun which is slipping over the sage and crabgrass separating the school and the street. The days are closing in faster and faster and the world feels like it’s slowed down in a moment of amber summer sunset with old platonic romances and new. The planets spin madly on.

Ralphie corners Carlos and Arnold after lunch to tell them to tell their parents that they’re hanging out with him after school, and to meet him in the parking lot. They warily agree and use Arnold’s cell phone to call both of their separate parents, all parties agreeing.

Rhode Island is cast in golden just post-sunset light when the small crowd of boys Ralphie has somehow assembled, which comes out to a crowd of three eighth graders, who stand taller than the others by a wide margin, Ralphie, Arnold, Carlos, Avery, and Adam.

Ralphie is carrying what looks to Carlos like a paintball gun or something. He feels very uncomfortable but follows the gaggle across the street to the empty lot a little ways from the school. Ralphie loads the gun while one of the eighth graders messes with a grimy bag. Carlos and Arnold hang back to watch it all.

A shot smacks them all to attention.

The pellet hits a plastic cup crumpled against the nearest dirt mound, opening a circle of splintered plastic in its side.

Then there’s something that looks kind of like a cigarette being passed around the little cluster and the gun’s being passed around too and they’re shooting at the mound of dirt and the different refuse gathered there that crouches over the back of the abandoned lot. Arnold and Carlos both refuse the cigarette thing for the heady fumes and a general anxiety of what they were doing, but only Arnold manages to refuse trying the pellet gun.

Carlos washes his hands six times in the boys’ bathroom but he still feels like they smell like gunpowder or sulfur or something. Everything’s spinning when his dad picks him up outside the school after they all return to Matthew Perry to go their separate ways. His dad says nothing.

Carlos locks himself in his room when they get home and he does his homework and then goes to bed after emerging for an unexciting dinner with his father and Mikey.

In math the next day Carlos glares at Ralphie and pointedly sits across the classroom but he’s moved back by the teacher so he tries to act like nothing’s changed.

Carlos and Keesha end up sitting together on the curb outside the building that day after school. She lets her hair loose and brushes it out with her fingers and then pulls it up again with the same hairband. As Carlos watches her he explains what happened yesterday. Somehow in the interim between then and the next day’s lunch, Keesha asks Ralphie to go elsewhere for lunch and such, and he leaves the group without another word, as seamlessly as Phoebe temporarily blended in. Phoebe does not make another appearance at lunch, though. Another casualty marches quietly by. Middle School is baring teeth. 

xxx

Keesha keeps a firm eye on the other members of her closer circle after Carlos tells her about Ralphie’s stint with drugs. While she personally doesn’t really care for guns, it’s alright for her personal friends to own them should they choose, doing drugs on the other hand, is unforgivable in her sixth grade perception.

She lulls herself with math homework and science extra credit work and calls Arnold, then has dinner with her mother and her grandmother. She goes to bed extra early so she can get up early for school. It feels right right now so she’s doing it.

The clouds as Keesha is walking to the library that day after school are clustering and swelling dark like black Cadillacs around a funeral. The smell of rain and waves and pressure dropping fills the air. The canvas of her backpack feels damp as she plunks it down next to her and leans it against her calf while she’s browsing the young adult audiobooks.

She checks eight out and puts the first cassette of the first “Harry Potter” book into her portable tape player. Keesha heads home and settles into her bed, watching as the rain begins to fall in big fat drops outside her window.

The rain doesn’t end for six days.

The entire state and bay area smell like seaweed, high tide and low tide for eight. The sun only shows its face in watery, grey light through thinner clouds, marbling gold through the steel fleece sky. Lightning puts this to shame on the third day when it begins cracking every few minutes, then every minute or so, then twice a minute, and so on until at the storm’s peak it seems to Keesha that the sky has a strand of lightning spiderweb caught in it at any given moment. Sun and lightning battle as the source of untrustworthy light and then the storm breaks and fades into the ocean.

Keesha comes out of the storm with a new passion for this Harry Potter series she picked up and spends the next month decked out in Gryffindor gear her mother buys her when she sees the twinkle in her eyes. 

xxx

The weeping willows in the courtyard of Matthew Perry are turning orange and yellow before Carlos’ eyes and he’s struck by how quick the seasons hurry into one another as opposed to how they used to. He ponders growing up. This is the first time he ponders growing up in a long string of times he will ponder growing up, this string will most likely continue at least into his thirties if not to death.

Carlos gets to school early on September fifteenth, a Friday, and he watches from the steps as the sun crests the school and sets the weeping willows’ orange leaves ablaze with morning light. He feels like it’s a good omen if he’s ever seen one.

Frosts have begun to work their way off the Bay, small ones, not enough to scare the plants yet, but chills at least. The morning is cold and the dew is beginning to freeze over on the grass in the spots it’s still shaded when the gang goes out to lunch.

Phoebe joins them again today, as she now often does. She sits next to Carlos today and halfway through eating and the normal middle school lunch gossip and chatter, she clears her throat and says,

“You know, I think everyone should definitely remember that Carlos’ birthday is on Sunday, so we should sing him happy birthday.” She then goes digging in her bag and pulls out a plastic container containing a single chocolate cupcake, which she hands to Carlos, and then puts a candle in.

“I don’t know how to light the candle, though,” Phoebe says, as if she’s only just realized. None of them have matches but Carlos doesn’t really care and he wishes for Phoebe’s happiness anyway and if it doesn’t come true, well, oh well, and anyway he’s got a really great chocolate cupcake anyway, right?

They do end up singing him happy birthday. A lunch monitor and a couple other groups of kids join in too, but they can’t remember Carlos’ name when it gets to that bit.

Carlos goes to math with a smile on his face even though he’s been sitting alone since Ralphie left his group of friends.

Carlos spends his actual twelfth birthday in a movie theater with Mikey watching Godzilla 2000 which came out the month before. They have a lot of fun and his dad buys him an ice cream cake and it’s pretty cool if Carlos has anything to say about it.

Autumn tumbles blindly on, the days squeezing tighter and leaves changing, then falling, leaving the world bathed in puddles of red and orange. There’s a kaleidoscope for Carlos’ vision on the General Relativity Lazy Suzan, it’s spinning a patchwork quilt of shiny golden glow fall colours before his eyes and he can’t help but love the sights he gets to see.

He grows more apart from his male counterparts, and to a certain extent from Keesha, although Carlos does manage to rekindle some companionship with Arnold in both of their resistance to the other boys in gym. It's not close, but it's comfortable at least.

Thanksgiving breezes by like Halloween with the same loss of shine Carlos has found clinging more and more to holidays and making him feel a little sick. He finds shelter in video games with Mikey more than ever and something strengthens between them over the growing season. Things feel nice amongst his family, if only for a short stretch. It’s comforting, a bit of rest Carlos sorely finds himself needing.

The grass crunches underfoot as Carlos walks Mikey into Walkerville. He’s making a pun about it when he realizes that the Frizz’ bus isn’t in the parking lot today and mentions it to Mikey, who doesn't seem phased by it. They say their goodbyes at the double doors and Carlos heads to his own school's frosted grass and skeletal dark trees. Winter at Matthew Perry seems to just be itself on high contrast and low saturation so far. Carlos is happy to get to Mrs. Sponcible's classroom for once if only to get out of the cold.

Carlos and Phoebe are taking off their coats when news comes of the year's first sixth grade field trip. While this is exciting it also means he's in for disappointment it seems, as he has been since fourth grade and every single fieldtrip since Ms. Frizzle’s class’ fieldtrips.

Ms. Sponcible is passing out permission slips, and Carlos sticks his in the front flap of his notebook, knowing there’s a good chance he might lose it later, but knowing that teachers pretty much don’t care about that kind of thing at the same time. It’s all to look good to the supervisors, he’s pretty sure.

Carlos has an inherent distrust of adults at this stage in his life that has been bred into him by media and hormones; the instinct to tear himself from authority’s grasp is waxing and will continue to do so. It makes him feel bitter and kind of hopeless and very very alone. Phoebe looks excited though, considering her interest with which she’s examining the information slip about the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium located just off Providence’s Polo Lake.

In Rhode Island it seems more and more likely that people just give directions by the closest water features, Carlos is starting to notice, which is frustrating because he doesn’t tend to notice water features.

The class talks in circles for the rest of the period about the field trip and the expectations for it and Carlos doodles in his english notebook and passes notes about how boring it all is with Phoebe for the full duration of the class.

Second period, he talks to Wanda about the field trip and about how they’re both going and it’ll be fun and it’ll be nice to get away from school but it won’t be as exciting as the Frizz was. Midway through, Wanda points out,

“I don’t think anything’s ever going to stack up to our third grade year, Carlos,” she says, “Maybe we should just try to forget about it and have fun anyway.”

Carlos nods, conceding to her point and realizing that maybe she’s right. The General Relativity Lazy Suzan dips heavily in Wanda’s favor if only for the helpful comment. The comment sticks in Carlos’ brain through the rest of the day up til gym, when, trying not to look at the place where Arnold’s skinny rib cage drops into his skinnier waist, Carlos is changing out of his gym uniform with sweat slicking his hair and skin.

“So are you going on the fieldtrip, Carlos?” Arnold is asking and Carlos is nodding along, passing along the information he’s scrounged throughout the day on it. Arnold adjusts his glasses after pulling his grey t-shirt over his head and Carlos feels his skin crawl. He tugs his own shirt over his head quickly and packs up his things.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says quickly to Arnold, the feeling of unease filling his stomach for seemingly no reason. Carlos grabs his things and leaves the room quickly.

Carlos’ father is, thankfully, waiting in the car with Mikey when Carlos makes it out the front door into the freezing cold and squares his shoulders against the wind. Somehow he remembers to hand his father the permission slip to sign when they get home. 

The day starts off cold, like most days, and Carlos wakes up, throws his covers aside after a long moment of seeping in the warmth of them. Then he tumbles downstairs in his boxers and t-shirt, his hair a mess, to Mikey’s room, where they play video games until noon. Then their dad tells Carlos to run a letter to the postbox for him, and with nothing to do besides lose another round of Mario Kart 64 to his brother, he elects, instead, to pile a coat on top of his hoodie and brave the late November cold. The postbox is two blocks down from the family’s two story, three bed two bath house, and the sidewalks are icy but mostly shoveled from the light dusting of snow last night. It’s cold but not frigid and Carlos almost feels like he didn’t need the gloves his dad made him put on. He drops the letter in the box without incident and turns to return home when he hears a whine.

Not two seconds later a mass hits the back of his knees and Carlos topples forward, scrabbling for anything to hold onto. His hands hit fur and he falls to sitting in the snow, feeling the wetness creep through his jeans and the bottom of his shirt, a mass of wet fur and paws, grizzled and dirty, is half in his lap.

The dog, who can’t be more than an adolescent judging by its puppy paws, cowers against him as a man approaches up the street. He’s of average height and wears a dark, ratty coat, his off-brown hair beginning to thin. None of him is particularly well kept. As he approaches, Carlos instinctively hugs the shivering puppy closer to him and watches his eyes, bloodshot at the whites.

“That’s my dog,” he says as he gets closer, but there’s an edge to his voice that Carlos doesn’t trust and he can tell it’s almost a lie. One thing is certain, though, Carlos is not letting this dog go with that guy, considering how scared she seems by him, how content to be in Carlos’ lap. He feels her shiver against him when the man reaches for her scruff.

Carlos hits the hand away.

“She’s not your dog, she’s mine,” he says, he doesn’t know where the words come from but the man seems taken aback.

“Look, kid, give my dog back. Sadie, come on girl,” he growls, and the dog doesn’t move but to lean a little harder into Carlos. Awkwardly, the boy hoists the dog, her spiked and dirty mottled fur falling around his fingers and her weight falling on his hips and back. She's a bit too heavy but he doesn’t care about the ache that swells when he picks her up, he has a conviction for this dog. She doesn’t struggle. With that, Carlos glares at the man, and turns around and starts walking to his house, dog in his arms. The man doesn’t follow him, shocked enough that some kid just had the gall to pick the dog he was chasing.

Carlos’ father has only ever been an animal person in two situations; observing them at the zoo or in the wild. He is less than thrilled when his son carries a dog through the front door, Mikey however is nothing short of absolutely ecstatic when she jumps from Carlos’ arms and puts her paws on Mikey’s knees to lick at his face. Mikey laughs hard and smooths fingers through the puppy’s mottled brown black and white fur.

“Carlos, is there a reason you’ve brought a dog into my house?”

Carlos looks at him with big eyes and puts on his most pitiful child’s expression.

“A mean guy was chasing her and making her scared. He said she was his but I didn’t believe him so I brought her home.”

“This seems to be a bit of a hairy situation,” his father says, and Carlos glares exasperated, then walks over and the puppy hops down from licking Mikey to look up at him, wagging her tail.

“Look at how much she likes it here, dad,” Carlos points out and his father sighs, then kneels down to get a better look at the puppy.

He ascertains out loud that she’s indeed about six months old, and has bi-colored eyes. He feels around for a collar or microchip or anything but can’t find one. Carlos’ father sighs.

“We’re taking her to the vet to see if she has a microchip or anyone’s missing a puppy,” he says.

“If she doesn’t have one can we keep her?” Mikey asks, and she wags her tail so Carlos’ father pets her a bit.

“Fine,” he says, shaking his head.

After looking through the phone book to find the nearest reputable vet, Carlos’ family loads themselves into the van, accompanied by the dog, who’s started to be called Sue by Carlos’ father and Mikey even though Carlos doesn’t like the name much. She responds to it already, though, which is nice.

The veterinary hospital is small, and situated just off the bay with huge windows in the waiting room and a waiting room full of people of all castes. They check in with the front desk and all three of them sit beside a woman with a cat in a bag and on the other side a gentleman with a large labrador who immediately snorts around Sue’s nose and fur and then decides she’s friendly enough and they go their separate ways. She sits at Carlos’ feet, well behaved as ever, on the length of rope they fashioned into a leash for her before they left.

When the vet’s assistant calls their name, Carlos stands first with Sue and takes the lead into the back room, but Carlos’ father does all the talking, and Carlos thanks his lucky stars for that.

“Well, she’s been treated pretty badly,” the vet says, looking through Sue’s fur, “she’s definitely been knocked around a time or two, but she’s not showing any aggression I can tell and she doesn’t show any signs of ownership. My best advice is to get her washed and fed, and treat her like a normal dog, see how that fairs. I’d like to see her again in a few months if you decide to keep her to see how her temperament is.”

Carlos father nods along, pays the bill, and they all leave, and head directly to the pet store, where they buy Sue a bag of dog food, a proper leash and collar, and two bowls. Carlos smiles the whole way and sits with her in the way way back. Sue rests her head on his lap and he strokes her messy fur.

When the family gets home, Carlos wrestles Sue into the bathtub and gives her a warm spraydown with the showerhead, and washes her fur out, careful of any place that makes her shy away from him. He’s gentle, and she rewards him by shaking water all over him once he’s done and trying to dry her off.

Sue looks better clean, her white belly gleaming without the grime and her brown, black, and grey mottled top brighter, with an almost copper sheen underneath. Her eyes are bright and when Carlos sits down to do his homework on the couch she leans against him and then puts her entire front half in his lap and falls asleep like that.

Carlos likes this dog a lot already. 

Monday Carlos wakes up with Sue sprawled on his bed taking up more space than he is himself. He slides out of the bed sideways so as to not bother her and gets dressed for school, then goes downstairs to the kitchen and pus her food bowl down with a cup and a half of her food. He hears her scramble up from his bed and he crosses to the fridge to grab milk for cereal as she races downstairs to shove her nose into the bowl. He pours his cereal and eats it in the kitchen, then drops his dishes in the sink and goes upstairs to get his backpack and homework. Sue follows him, and then follows them all out to the car.

She tries to follow Carlos and Mikey when they get out to get Mikey into Walkerville safely but their father stops her, and does the same when Carlos gets out to go to Matthew Perry.

All of his friends are various shades of jealous when they learn about his new puppy but the conversation devolves into one about all of their pets and everyone is happy. The lunch group has moved to an inner staircase of the school since it began freezing.

He returns home to feed a very happy dog, and he definitely thinks it’s far more than the food he’s putting down making her happy. She sleeps with him from then on. And hogs the bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big big thanks to C. R. and Vee again. And to everyone who left comments and kudos. Midway through writing chapter 4 right now, but chapter 3 is being edited as we speak.  
> ~ E


	3. Dripping Pitch and Made of Wood

The mornings start dissolving into coffee after Christmas break when Carlos’ father begins letting him drink it. Every morning is a slow buzz of caffeine at the edges of his temples and behind the bridge of his nose. 

February’s slow buzz of growing warmth warring with the cool breezes off the bay matches this buzz to a tee and everything is blending together like Carlos’ life is going faster than ever and it slows just long enough to catch a kaleidoscopic view of the dew and snow melting off the grass. Mikey’s wheels make a certain slurping noise through the melting spring slush and Carlos can feel the water soak his high tops and turn the red a muddy russet brown with the dirt frozen into the bottom layer of the snow since November. 

Carlos watched wide eyed this morning on the news as a local man lit his tap water on the fire and before school they stopped at the store to get five gallons of filtered water because his dad was scared of the water situation. The world now seems much more antagonistic today because of it. 

Sue slept late today but Carlos put her breakfast down anyway.

“Here we go,” Carlos says to himself as he sets wet feet upon the threshold of his school. 

He sits in the desk next to Phoebe who was ten minutes early as usual and slings his backpack, full of all of today’s books so he doesn’t have to stop at his locker except for at lunch, into its place below his desk. She’s already begun their note passing paper for the day, she passes it. 

_ Good morning, Carlos. How’s Sue?,  _ it says as usual. 

_ Sue slept late. I’m good though. What about you? Happy the snow’s finally melting?  _

_ I’m great! I got into this marine biology summer camp I can’t wait to go to. Something to look forward to this summer definitely! _

Carlos smiles at her in response and gives her a subtle thumbs up, then writes;

_ So where is it? _

_ It’s on the bay, so it’s not like out of state or anything, but the high school one is in like California.  _

_ That’s awesome. I hope you find your inner porpoise out there or something. Haha. Get it? Porpoise! _

_ CARLOS! _

  
  


The day leaks into caffeine haze and then he’s exiting the boys’ locker room where axe body spray has begun to reign as supreme scent after a seasonal fad of it this winter. Everything is coated in masculine odor if left there for more than thirty minutes. Carlos doesn’t envy the boys who actually leave stuff in their gym lockers. Wanda pulls Carlos aside as they’re doing the warm up run, and says she wants him to come over to her house after school.

“Maybe,” he says. He ends up calling his dad and asking, turns out going to Wanda’s after school. 

Wanda lives in a ranch house in a little neighborhood tucked away from the Bay near the natural history museum. Her mother makes them both coffee and the day eases into them laying on the carpet and telling each other weirder and weirder stuff until she’s saying,

“Do you think our bones are gonna one day be fossils?”

“I dunno, are you really here or are you dead? Are you sleeping?” Carlos responds and giggles. After a long moment, he soberingly adds, “Us breathing kills us, you know, it basically creates tiny fires inside us that make everything catch and move. That’s kind of what science thinks life is or whatever.”

“Do you believe what you’re saying right now, Carlos?” Wanda asks, rolling her eyes.

After a long deliberation Carlos nods and then says, “Yeah, right now. But not that often, you know?”

Wanda nods.

“I wanna go home now if that’s okay,” Carlos says, and she nods, so he goes to ask Wanda’s mom to take him home. They start to describe this feeling as ‘high on air’, a term that follows them through middle school.

  
  


Wanda listens to strange rhythmic music her father has on a casette tape for a long time after Carlos leaves. She imagines the devil dancing to it, doing the grim vocals and singing his wretched heart out. Plucked strings define his being and she does homework doodling little devils on the margins playing trumpets and brandishing pitchforks and briefcases, then goes to bed.

That night, Wanda has her first serious nightmare, she comes upon a river, after searching frantically lost in the woods and thirsty for an hour, and stumbles to its banks to drink only to see her mother then Carlos float dead by in the river.

The nightmare is only in its seeds now. She wakes early in the morning and goes back to bed, to pleasanter dreams.

The next day she wakes in a good mood. She goes to school with few memories or lasting vibrations of the nightmare she encountered only hours prior. First period brings her to math, which she spends doodling back and forth during with Keesha. She doodles a bean plant and Keesha adds clouds at the top. They go from there. 

Social studies is painfully boring because Carlos has gone to the nurse for a bloody nose and has somehow managed to dodge an entire period with Mr. Shi in the process. She’s pretty sure he’s milking it out for the nurse so he doesn’t have to deal with the loads of busywork Mr. Shi has taken to giving them on a daily basis. 

Wanda has English third period, and she doesn’t really know anyone there except Avery and she’s been avoiding him lately. She doesn’t know why, but her guts don’t say anything good about him and she sure as hell trusts her guts.

At lunch, Carlos recounts his brave trip to the nurse’s office and daring escape from Mr. Shi’s dumb worksheets until tomorrow at least and Keesha brings cookies that her mom made the night before. 

Sometime between fourth and sixth periods, Wanda ends up being scouted for the school’s girl scouts extracurricular junior troupe. She almost turns the offer down but she secretly goes home and tells her mom she might want to start going to the meetings, just because, just to make some other friends. That’s what she’s telling herself at least.

  
  


One of the eighth grade boys who shot at the dirt mound with Ralphie and the two of them catches up to Arnold and Carlos as they’re walking out of the school one day. 

“Hey, I’m Sean, Sean Delta, we hung out with your friends last fall uh. Do you wanna catch a smoke with me or somethin?” he asks, his eyes are full of cautious curiousity, Carlos doesn’t understand it and from the confused looks Arnold is shooting at him, neither does the redhead behind him. He adjusts his backpack strap, shaking his head.

“No thanks, man, our rides are here. Catch you later though?” he says, with a little less conviction and confidence than he was trying for, but Sean smiles a full face smile at him and Carlos freezes to look at it. It commands Arnold’s attention too, just for being so brilliantly happy. 

“Awesome, catch you guys later,” he says, and then Sean dissolves into the crowd between them and the front doors of the school. Carlos and Arnold look at each other, both more than confused by the small, bright encounter they’ve just had. Carlos shrugs, and says goodbye to Arnold, though, and scurries off to where their van is parked in the loading-only zone out front. 

The spring should feel nice but it feels wet and uncomfortable like the feeling in his stomach when Carlos wakes up most mornings. Sue brightens his mornings though. The Ramons start taking her to the dog park in the afternoons after school that’s just next to the high school Carlos will likely be going to in three years. Three years seems like a very very long time and middle school is not shaping it up to be a particularly comfortable three years.

It’s not that the classes are dull, but he simply can’t really find any worth in their content, he doesn’t feel like he’s learning like he was last year, everything is exercising concepts again and again and again; he doesn’t feel smart like he did in Walkerville, he just feels bored. He’s filling up his brain with a billion facts that he already knew just stretched and re-memorised, it feels useless. 

His friends feel fake, he feels fake, they’re all pretending to be students, that’s how it’s starting to feel and somehow Spring Break breaks the trend.

Arnold’s sitting around in Mikey’s room with Mikey, Sue, and Carlos, and they’re collapsed in a puddle of laughter. None of them will later remember the joke but they’re kicking off spring break great, and the March sun feels warmer than it has in months, the wind off the bays feel warm and promising. The seagulls are louder than ever. 

A flock of pelicans is beating its wings when they all go out front to shoot hoops (and in Sue’s case play an obstacle). Mikey beats Arnold but Arnold beats Carlos (Carlos says he beat Sue because she was a pretty bad obstacle to make himself feel better and no feelings are hurt) by the time they’re sitting out front sipping coffees and feeling cool. 

“Guys!” Mikey shouts, and he points, the hand he’s not using steadying his mug around the base. Carlos follows his finger and sees a bright white butterfly.

“Mariposa,” Mikey says softly, mostly to himself, and Carlos laughs a little.

“Isn’t it early for butterflies?” Arnold asks, straightening his glasses. 

“It must be the first one of the year,” Carlos says, shrugging. They go inside after that and eat icecream sandwiches Carlos finds in the basement freezer and they all play mario kart and Mikey beats both of the older boys because Mikey is some sort of mario kart deity. 

  
  


Spring Break turns out to serve as Summer’s home town. Carlos can feel heat, humidity, and something stronger swelling under his fingertips as he tromps down the green grass around the flourishing willows in the school’s front lawn after the last friday’s last bell. 

Carlos’ chest feels full as he bounds over to his dad’s car. Sue greets him with big sloppy kisses and the warm air feels thick enough to hold up any mood in the afternoon sun. Carlos’ calves have been hurting for the past two weeks, his father says it’s growing pains but it weighs heavy on his mind the first few days of summer break, strange enough. He calls Wanda and they go to a movie with their parents on the third day, and Carlos doesn’t make any real plans for the rest of the summer. He feels like planning it will hem it in but his father’s making all sorts of plans with aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. 

Carlos listens to Mikey sing when he thinks he’s alone one afternoon and the little tremble in his voice when it hits a longing word stirs Carlos forward. Carlos listens to him from the living room as he wheels into the kitchen and then out, realizes he’s been listened too, blushes and wheels off to his room. 

They go on a camping trip with Carlos’ cousins, Elba and Ivory, and their mother, Carlos’ father’s sister, Mary, two weeks into vacation and camp by a river with big round slippery rocks on the edge of clear, cool water that runs fast through the campsite. They camp fifty yards from the banks of the river, two huge tents and Mikey’s accessible tent. It’s comfortably set away from other campsites, as this is one of three wheelchair reserved camping spots just near the river and the ranger station. 

Carlos and Elba are hopping one rock to another with morning light filtering warm and reassuring through the dense trees above. The water catches the sun and scatters it to the wind, and Carlos’ shoes slap against the rock at the very center of the stream. The sun and heat set the leaves’ scents swirling around the two children and he reaches out to her to steady her on the rock with him. They overbalance momentarily, just long enough for Carlos to need to step back to steady himself, and his stomach drops as his right foot loses grip on the stone His heart falls before his body does, and his brain registers the sound of his body hitting the water before it registers the pain. And by the time the pain fingers its way into his brain his vision is clouding and there's a dark border slowly swallowing his vision. 

Carlos comes to with an ache in his skull to the sound of what he can only assume is the squeakiest tire he's ever heard and he really does not want to hear more. Without thinking, even opening his eyes, he rolls, and brings his arm up to block the ear he isn't laying on. He groans at the way that just makes the aches a million times worse and sends white dots scattering over the back of his eyelids. The tire squeak stops and something hot and wet moves against his arm. Carlos reluctantly begins to open his eyes but immediately closes them as the sun hits them and it feels like six inch needle has been pounded through both of his eyes. 

“Hey, woah, Carlos, don't close your eyes. Don't fall asleep again. How do you feel?” a voice says. He identifies it blearily as his father's. 

What Carlos wants to say is “it feels like a fucking railroad spike just got jammed through my brain what the hell” but he doesn't, instead he just groans again. 

“Not good,” he mutters. 

“Do you remember?” Elba's voice is asking as Carlos tries to open his eyes slowly for the second time. It's a little better this time. Sue's face comes into focus, and her tongue slides against his arm again. Her ears are pricked forward, nothing but concern in her furred face. 

“I fell off the rock.” 

“And you say I'm the clumsy one,” Mikey says from somewhere off to the right. Carlos reaches up to his father, who's just behind Sue, and moves himself up to sit. 

Carlos tries to think of a pun to retort with but his brain isn't calibrating right and he's so tired. He keeps losing focus when he tries to associate the wordplay. Sitting up just makes the vertigo spin his whole vision on an axis of nine billion degrees again and again until his head slowly stops pounding and his eyes almost get the hang of working together and he becomes aware of the chilled water droplets sliding over his skin with the movement. He's sitting on the ground outside Mikey's tent, with the rest of his family bunched around him, wide concerned eyes. Mikey's usual smile has fallen to a neutral expression, the corner of his lips tight. Concern, though Carlos knows even now that Mikey's horrifically good at hiding his own emotions in times like this. Carlos' father's fingers are fit into the dip below his wrist when Elba and Ivory's mother is checking him over, and Carlos is caught confused and interested in why he cannot for the life of him ever remember being to the hospital except with Mikey even though if memory serves, at least since fourth grade, he's been getting in situations far more dangerous and stressful than slipping on a rock in a river and hitting his head. 

After they've determined that his injury isn't too serious, Carlos spends the rest of the day sitting in Mikey's tent with him while Mikey ties the ends of his fraying blanket together and Carlos mumbles out the words to the Harry Potter book he's reading so Mikey can listen to. Mikey doesn't let him fall asleep until well into the night, on his father's orders, and when he does he doesn't end up returning to the other tent. 

Mikey and Carlos slept together more commonly a very long time ago, before the wheelchair, before his brittle bones had a name to their defects, before it started feeling like hospitals sucked the hope out of his little brother. Nowadays, Carlos can't help but feel like he'll break him, even though he's stronger than he's ever been before. Even though he can maneuver himself and he hasn't broken a bone in a while and even though he's doing okay, when Carlos wakes up with his brother's wrist in his hand and the sunlight filtering through the tent to catch his coffee-brown eyelashes he can't help but think that Mikey looks like a glass doll. Fragile. He gently releases his brother's wrist and extracts himself from his sleeping form. Mikey moves, unhappy but not conscious yet so Carlos gets up, unzips the tent, crawls out of it. 

The milky morning light catches each blade of grass in a way that it only can on the stillest of mornings when the rest of the world is still sleeping and the grass and the wild chamomile tucked into it, just barely beginning to bloom amongst the green and wild strawberry flowers, cradle the sunlight like water. The dull throb in his head is ceasing. Carlos starts a pot of coffee on the camp stove and sits to enjoy the sun on his back. 

The next and final day of their camping trip is the one that seals this all as the worst camping trip in the history of everything. It starts off much the same, Carlos and Ivory are awake before anyone else, and Carlos makes coffee while Ivory does sudoku at the picnic bench. Mikey and Carlos' father join them not much later and by the time Elba and Mary are up, Sue has already been fed and they're to the second small pot of coffee. As soon as they've extracted themselves from bed and mined the sleep from the corners of their eyes, the somewhat extended Ramon family begins to collapse the tents while Mikey sits with Sue by the river, skipping stones. The flat ones skip best, but he can't seem to scrabble any of them that are properly round and keeps messing up with the curve and flick of his wrist. Carlos was always better at stone skipping but Mikey has optimism and energy as renewable resources and has been talented at hiding any emotion but happiness since a young age. He doesn't let his smile falter when his stones splash gracelessly into the mirror of the water.

By the time they've got the luggage in the cars, Mr Ramon is chuckling and waving goodbye to Mary and her girls and Mikey can tell that his father has had a conversation with Mary in the interim between when they arrived and their departure, not just any conversation, either. Something significant. Curiousity itches at his tongue but Mikey quells the interest and pats Sue's head instead of asking what happened. A truck rattles in the distance around the bend, and Mikey hardly registers it because Carlos is suddenly at his side making a joke and he laughs, a genuine laugh because half of what Carlos says is pure gold in his ten year old mind. He's rolling toward the van when the loud yipe snaps Mikey's attention to Sue, who's paw he's just run over. The husky bolts. 

The thing is that the puppy bolts toward the street, and across it. The sound of her claws on asphalt is the last thing Mikey processes in normal time, because then Carlos' converse slapping on the blacktop as he follows her sound like they're simultaneously too fast and too slow and the grunting of the engine of the car that collides with him while Sue circles back can't even exist in time. Mikey's brain can't register it. Doesn't. Not until much later.

Mikey ends up spending his birthday in the hospital with his brother looking out at the sparkling lights of the Rhode Island bay and feeling the first seeds of a kind of self loathing that will only flirt with his brother, but that will, one day, devour him in the most perfect, disgusting way. He smiles anyway, each time Carlos comes to. He thanks his lucky stars, and all the city lights.

 

Carlos quickly learns how immensely boring spending half the summer in the hospital with his brother is and he ends up watching Dead Zone and Degrassi for endless hours while Mikey sits next to him and plays a game on his gameboy. Technically, he's only in the hospital for two weeks but it's still exhausting and boring and Carlos finds that it is quite literally the dullest two weeks he's ever had. A week and a half in, though, when the pain is slowly ebbing away into itching and the exhaustion of healing has faded but they still won't let him get up and move around, he's moved into a dual room with another boy, asleep, sickly looking. 

It isn't until well into the night that he wakes, and that they introduce themselves. 

“Zach,” he breathes, across the space between their beds, his voice still so tired it's close to cracking, “Zach Nichols. What are you in for?”

Carlos can't help but flinch at that. “My name's Carlos. I got hit by a car. You?”

Zach just laughs quietly and shakes his head. He has russet hair that hangs into his eyes in a way that says it hasn't been properly cut in months, and dull dull brown eyes. He's got to be a year or two older than Carlos but he looks small. Smaller than he should. They share a long, level stare. 

“I'm just here temporarily, before they move me to the psych ward,” says Zach, finally.

“Why?” Carlos doesn't even think as he says it. 

“I took too many pills.” The conversation is over after that and Carlos doesn't push when his roommate turns over in bed and goes back to sleep. He does the same, trying to get the constraining feeling light blankets that smell of nothing but hospital laundry detergent out of the edges of his brain as it slowly constricts in on him. 

During the next twenty four hours or so, though, Carlos and Zach talk only a few times, both preferring to keep quiet and both going uncharacteristically without visitors. But by the time that Carlos has checked out of the hospital he's starting to forget the specific moments when they talked but somewhere along the line he's lost something, and it's taking him over, like his innards are uncoiling and his chest is an open chasm and Zach and Mikey and his father and Wanda and the rest of them, the close ones, the real ones, they're the only people who are even close to the burden of filling it. 

When they say goodbye, Carlos' heart dies with a sputter and a spark. The light closes. He's not sure what it means or why but his life has begun to blur together in a single feverdream or maybe that's just the painkillers they prescribe him as he wheels out of the hospital next to Mikey. He only barely manages to stay upright while he climbs into the car. 

 


	4. It Takes a Long Time but God Dies Too

Mikey's sense of guilt and doom doesn't wane over the course of the month or so after Carlos is released from the hospital. The feeling of dread coats and drips from his stomach and diaphragm every time he so much as touches his brother or Sue and his brother's blatant distance from him doesn't help. By the time August is seeping slowly into the impossibly hot living room, they've stopped spending time together in Mikey's room. They've stopped playing video games. Mikey's withdrawn in on himself and he's all but stopped working with computers and electronics.

It's not that he doesn't want to or that he can't there's just not the motivation or the spark there that there used to be. It doesn't feel like art anymore, just cold calculations and clutter in his brain. Carlos spends all his time holed up in his room with his new cell phone that their dad gave him talking to the boy he met at the hospital and something burns low and sour in the pit of Mikey's stomach. He feels like something begins to fray now, he feels like this is somehow the beginning of the end. 

The apocalypse, Mikey decides, is going to be a painful affair mostly written in barcode and flesh-wounds.

 

Carlos' nose is itchy with the tickle of the pollen off the weeping willows as he steps foot on Matthew Perry soil for the first time in nearly three months. A lot has happened; he's taller now, and lankier. Losing that baby fat and learning to hold his tongue better than his friends and with Mikey at his side he can't help but feel a little more confident in facing the school. 

All that aside, it still feels like stepping into enemy territory. A certain tiredness he didn't even realize had been lifted from his shoulders immediately slouches back onto them. The prison door slams shut. 

Carlos drags his hands to Mikey's chair with what feels like lead pulsing through his veins. Everything feels heavy and too slow but Mikey has that determined look on his face, the one that means they can't lose. Not today.

The elder brother pushes the younger through the courtyard and into the huge doors that stand between the two of them and Matthew Perry Middle School. Carlos almost feels like a casualty on his feet. He wonders how long this year will take to break him. (Or if he's already broken.)

 

First period is theatre with Mr King, who looks older than last year by a wide margin. It's something about the creases and bags under his eyes. He's the only other person in the room when Carlos enters, so he tries to conceal his looking while he pulls his pencil case from his overstuffed backpack. Then the door is open and suddenly there's a girl - a woman – with beautiful blonde hair and she's framed by the light from the windows in the hall, like she has a goddamn halo. 

Carlos drops his eyes to his scattered, dull pencils while DA carefully chooses the seat as far away from him as possible. The summer's done her well. She's taller now, the purple striped shirt she wears expertly covers the swelling of breasts under it, but caresses them in the fall of the fabric. Dorothy-Ann crosses her longer, thinner legs and brushes her blonde hair over her shoulder and smoothes her teal skirt down her thighs and he feels his throat go dry. 

This isn't quite the same as that feeling in his gut when he talks to Zach on the phone, it slides deeper than that, finding a heat in his stomach he didn't realize was there. It grows there, like a bottle filling with hot water. He feels a little queasy after looking at her for so long and he drops his gaze again, wetting his lips and the roof of his mouth with a shaking tongue.

For the rest of the period, Carlos' eyes flit between Dorothy-Ann's hold on the book in her hands, and the clock above the door. The school feels way way too small with her in it. He wants to be as far away from the blond as he possibly can be. Even when the room fills with other people he can't tear his gaze from her or remove the slimy ball from his stomach where it's forming. 

When the bell rings for the end of the period, Carlos lets out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding tight to his chest. 

 

Mister Stavit, period two English teacher at the seventh grade level, is a tall man with a ribcage nothing short of trying to escape his spine and the rest of his body. It pushes his clavicles far far out and his t-shirt showcases the dips in them deep enough to hold water. He looks like a pigeon with its chest feathers puffed up and it makes Carlos smile because the dips in his skin are a welcome reprieve to his brain still catching on the curve of fabric at DA's hip. It's something else to focus on. Not nearly so carnal, but just as aesthetically pleasing.

Phoebe and Wanda come in side by side, smiles caught on both their lips and notebooks in their arms. Carlos relaxes a bit as soon as they've sat down next to him, one on either side. 

Phoebe hasn't changed much over the summer, not physically. Her auburn hair's a little longer, and she's showing the same early curves that DA is but they don't catch his eyes like hers did. Phoebe is still adorned in daffodil yellow and deep red, and she looks as sweet as she always has. Carlos couldn't even imagine his eyes stuttering over her chest. But they do stop on her lips, stained red with lipstick now. Crudely applied eyeshadow is on her face as well and Carlos feels a tiny bit of anger inside burning at that. Like she's ruining the innocent beauty she had before. But he has to remind himself it's not his place to judge, as his father would, as Mikey would remind him. He turns his gaze to Wanda. 

She, as opposed to Phoebe, has once again sprung up like a weed in he intermittent time between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next. Now towering above both Phoebe and Carlos even with Carlos' own summer growth, she's cut her hair short again so it hangs close around her ears and frames dark eyes the same way her almost expert eyeliner does. For a brief moment, Carlos fears this is the beginning of Wanda outgrowing their little makeshift group. Then she speaks. 

“Hey you weasley wimp, how the heck are you doing?” the voice comes with a huge smile, an old Wanda smile, a relaxed, friendly one. From there, only smiles are exchanged between the three until the door slams open and one Ralphie Tenneli stands before them. He, well, he hasn't changed so drastically as Wanda, but his shoulders are broader and his gravity lower, and his lower left eyelid is bruised in a single long brushstroke from the inner corner to the outer one. The purple bordering on yellow turns Carlos' stomach as he looks at it too long and he has to drop his eyes to his notebook while Wanda and Phoebe whisper fervently about the new arrival. 

Ralphie slings his too-heavy backpack into the seat in the far back left, same row as the three of them but as far as possible from them while still close to the door. He takes out a piece of scratch paper (a flier of some sort is on the back) and starts scribbling half-thought out comic of some sort. Carlos listens as Wanda and Phoebe murmur about his black eye and then steals his gaze back to the pigeon chested teacher who he's starting to think is going to be his only glimpse of sanity most mornings. 

He's almost happier to see this period end than the last one. 

 

Thankfully, and Carlos doesn't think he's ever been able to say this, his next period is math, with a conspicuously white haired teacher named, no joke, Mister Alfredo. Mister Alfredo is a dull man in a duller room that is devoid of even the cheery math posters that usually adorn math classrooms encouraging students to never give up and telling them which multiplications of what end up how. 

Alfredo isn't the reason Carlos is down for this class, though, it's the fact that his brother is sitting quietly by the window to the far left of the classroom, and that means that some familiarity and comfort is easily found here at least. 

As he sits next to Mikey, his head jerks up to survey the person suddenly in this space and Carlos can almost detect a grimace at his lips before he smiles the charming smile Carlos has grown to know and love. The sky behind his brother has gone grey with rain soaked clouds that hang around the school like hearses. Something in his brother's face mirrors this but Carlos swallows the feeling of unease and relaxes into his presence instead, with hardly so much as a “Hey Mikes.” 

Carlos feels around in his bag for a fresh notebook and pencil and slides Mikey a note while Alfredo starts his lesson. 

_How's your first day going?_ He writes, _Get lost yet?_

Mikey smirks at him as he slides the paper over, then returns it with his scrawled handwriting slanting across the page. _No, remember? I've got a better sense of direction than you do and I'm not a fucking idiot._

Carlos thinks, through the somewhat easy idea that the syllabus gives him of the class, and through the passing notes with his brother for the rest of the period, that this year, math won't be so hard to grasp. If only for it being less of an obstruction to his happiness in earlier years. 

By the time they're spilling out the door to find a spot under the willows, the knot in Carlos' stomach is untying and he's finding his comfortable reverberation. Wanda's already under the tallest willow, and Keesha nearly runs into them as they exit the doors. She's virtually the same as last year, longer hair, and she takes the lead to the place they've decided to sit. 

Mikey, Phoebe, Keesha, and Wanda are the only ones who occupy the circle until Arnold comes tumbling in from who knows where. He's dressed more formally than the rest of them but looks hardly any different, a little taller, ever so slightly less nervous. Still. The usual uncertainty is there in his eyes and Mikey chuckles. 

“Hey Arnold,” he says, before any of the other people in their little group have a chance to greet him, but they all nod in agreement and Arnold smiles his nervous smile and plops down next to Keesha. 

 

Carlos has science with Keesha and Arnold after that, and he's delighted to find himself in Mister Taur's room once more. He lets himself sink into the tectonic discussion with an ease that surprises himself. The weight of the world slips off of his shoulders long enough for him to learn, and then he's off to Social Studies alone. 

Being alone in class isn't so much upsetting as mind numbingly boring. One girl catches his eye from across the room halfway through Miss White's syllabus rambling, though, and Carlos uses shrugging his jacket off and getting his arm stuck in the hole as an excuse to let his eyes skate over her for a little too long. 

She's a chubby, short, hispanic girl, with short, brown, inconspicuous hair and equally inconspicuous square glasses. She's also wearing what appears to be little more than pajamas as though she's completely ignored and forgone the “First Day of School Etiquette” of dressing nice and making a good impression. She's hardly even paying attention to Miss White's droning about the syllabus, she's got a big notebook open in front of her and she's sketching some sort of pictures across the lines and she just seems so focused. Carlos moves the three empty seats to sit next to her, to get a better look of the robot that she's drawing. 

It's a bird, maybe. It's crude, but it's definitely a robotic animal on two legs. Could be a dinosaur, honestly, but it looks more like a bird. Sharp face. Crest thing.

She's smiling at it though, tucking brown hair behind her ear and letting dark eyes slide over the page and then her eyes are up, startled, on him. And she smiles. 

The girl is younger than he is, definitely. Fresh out of elementary school. Sixth grader, has to be. Although she must be pretty advanced to be in this class. He offers her a matching smile. 

“Hello,” she mouths, and he mouths back a “Hey” between the grin on his lips, then turns back to the teacher so he doesn't draw attention. She goes back to looking at her sketching and he's careful to watch when she signs it off with a date and a name. 

Inez. 

He'll have to remember that. 

 

The last class of the day is by no means so comforting, once again he's landed with gym last period of the day and Carlos is just short of spitting on the floor he's so offput by it. He doesn't exactly want to look Mister Shun in the face again right now but he does, and when they figure out their uniforms, Carlos discovers that he's joined in this class by Arnold and, to his dread, Ralphie. Ralphie's bigger than any of the other boys by a respectable margin and Mister Shun congratulates him on “becoming a man” when he sees him, then pointedly scatters glares to the rest of the boys and girls in the room. 

Today has been a rollercoster, and this is definitely the low point, running endless laps to 'warm up', and looking two paces ahead to see Ralphie's back where the grey shirt is darkening with sweat and feeling resentment bubble like bile in his throat when he thinks about the feeling that realizing he used to be friends with someone who lets people cut others down on his behalf. 

His lungs, muscles and brain are more than relieved when he stumbles out of the gym smelling like sweat and unpleasantness. He decides he's cut out neither for physical activities like this nor dealing with people who are okay with seeing others hurt. 

When he walks out of the back doors of the school, Carlos finds himself stopped dead by confusion at the sight in front of him. His eyes slide over the stark edge of Sean Delta's shirt against his shoulder first, then the boy who's squarely between the upperclassman ( _isn't he a ninth grader now? Why the hell is he still here?_ Carlos thinks idly) and the brick wall. Sean has his hand under the boy's shirt, hitching the blue fabric up enough to show navel and they're connected from thighs to mouth, tongues making this slightly offputting squelching noise against one another. 

The door closes behind Carlos with a clunk and Sean's suddenly spinning around to look wide eyed at him. He relaxes a little when he recognizes Carlos but terror still flickers in his eyes while the boy behind him flushes a bright red that almost matches his shiny lips. 

Carlos speaks as soon as Sean opens his mouth, before he even has a chance to freak. 

“I didn't see anything,” he chokes out and takes a few steps back until he can lean against the door and fumble for the handle. For a long moment, it looks like Sean is about to say something, but he closes his mouth definitively and gives Carlos a tiny nod, then mouths “thanks” and picks up his bag before starting off the other direction as Carlos swings the door open. 

One last cursory glance at the kid who was pinned to the wall confirms that Carlos has no idea who he is and that _wow_ kissed lips look nice. A strand of saliva is drying at the corner of his mouth and that's kind of gross but whatever. 

 

By the time he catches up to Mikey, Carlos is a minute late instead of a minute early and he's also out of breath from running across the school to the front doors after spending a period running laps. His lungs burn and his heart pounds dull in his chest and his eyelids feel hot and heavy and honestly all of today has just been offputting and tiring and upsetting and he stops himself from that train of thought when he sees Mikey because Mikey's putting on a smile so he should too. 

They greet their father with their smiles on crooked but not loose. Sue returns the smiles twofold and licks their faces as they manage to finagle their way into the car. She puts her big paws up on the seat where Carlos sits and refuses to hop down until they're pulling up in front of their house and Mikey's rolling up to the front door. She trots after his wheels, wagging her tail like a flag in the wind and letting her pink tongue loll out to the left. 

Carlos doesn't take his hand from her head until he has to. In all of this, it's nice to be able to come home, have a snack, and laze on the couch with Mikey's hand petting his hair while the other controls his video game and Carlos drifts off to sleep. 

The last thing he remembers is his father mentioning he has a message on the phone. Then it's dead quiet and his eyes slide closed, his shoulders unclench, and he's gone to the world. 

 

Mikey watches his brother fall asleep, watches his consciousness dissolve like sugar cubes in coffee while his gameboy color spills out the sounds of Silver's pokemon battle. Before long he turns back to fainting a snubbul and listening to the rain begin to fall on the roof. For a long long moment, in the stillness of the house sheltered from the rain, Mikey smiles his first real smile in a while, since at least the car accident. Because Carlos' hair in his hand is soft and warm and the smell of rain fills the room with a calmness Mikey can't even describe right. 

But that's the thing; everything feels right. Like the universe has tilted into the proper position for once. If only once. 

Mikey only moves his hand away once he's absolutely certain Carlos is fast, fast asleep. Even then it lingers in his hair for a long moment.

 

Carlos wakes up when the velvet dark sky is pressing itself wanton against the windows and the stars have snuffed themselves out against the Rhode Island city night. He's breathing hard. The face of a skeletal ram is glued to the back of his eyelids. He can see it burned there from the dream. The world smells like the lawn after the sprinkler's left on too long and his joints ache from sleeping on the couch. His brother isn't next to him and the living room is dark, cold.

Sue tails him quietly to bed and when he flops down with her she shoves her noise under his hand. He scratches her brown forehead and absently opens the drawer in his nightstand to root around for something to read and his fingers scrabble against an old issue of zoobooks which he pulls out. By the dim light of the streetlight out the window, Carlos pages through the glossy sheets of magazine paper and leans into Sue's warmth beside him.

When he wakes up there's a message on the answering machine for him and his face is pressed against the glossy page. The husky beside him has remained warm and present but as he sits up she happily scoots of the bed and looks back at him, tail waving in the noon light.

Carlos stumbles to the bathroom, only vaguely aware of of the catch of thigh against boxers as he rubs sleep out of his eyes and pulls the bathroom door half shut behind him before turning to the mirror and carding a hand through his dark hair. It's getting too shaggy.

While he leans over the sink, the fabric of his boxers catching more at something tacky on his thigh. He straightens, taken aback, and slides a hand between his legs to pull his boxer leg up and examine the semi-white substance at his thigh.

Blinking, he turns around and hollers out the half open door, “DAAAAAAAAAAD!”

 

His dad is chuckling as Carlos eyes his examination of the boxers, nervous.

“Don't look at me like that, you becoming a man only means we have to cut it off, son.”

“What?” The look goes from scared to mortified as Carlos' hands fly to cradle his dick.

“That was a joke. I suppose this means it's time for me to give you the Talk,” Mr Ramon says it with a very stern, serious look, and then sits down on the lid of the toilet. Carlos' eyes are wide, his pupils blown jet circles.

“When a man and a--” Carlos snaps into the situation enough to cut his father off there.

“Oh my god stop, I know.”

“Oh.” His father's expression is clouded, then he nods. “You're a man now, Carlos.”

And then he simply stands up, and walks out of the bathroom, leaving Carlos to scrub the cum stains from his thigh in the shower while desperately confused and still panicking just a little.

 

After a half an hour long shower Carlos tumbles into the kitchen with rivulets streaming down his neck and a t-shirt clinging to his wet shoulders. His father directs him toward the phone.

“You've got a message, son,” he says, and Carlos tries to shake the events of the morning while he leans over the counter to grab the phone off the hook and listen to the message it has to offer.

“Hey uh,” Zach's voice says, ragged from the other line, “Carlos. Carlos Ramon. You need to call me back. Right now. Thanks. Bye.”

Carlos' heartbeat speeds up and he punches in Zach's number as quickly as he can, fingers shaking.

It rings. Once. Twice. Eight times. Then the line goes dead. Carlos won't have word of Zach for another month. And even when he does it will be too late.

 

There are a lot of things Mikey wishes he'd stop thinking. There are a lot of things he wants out of his head and they stick to his brain like flies in honey. As he finds his way slowly into the kitchen to find Carlos looking shaken, he has to hold his tongue for a long moment before just shaking his head, leaving Carlos be to deal with whatever it is that's making him look like he's seen a ghost. That's for the best. Mikey knows he needs to stop pushing his way into Carlos' life where he's not welcome.

The problem with that, he realizes as he pours his coffee and makes his way around to the table with it, is that he's lived in Carlos' footsteps his whole life and stepping out of them to give Carlos the room Mikey assumes he needs right now will literally push Mikey into a situation he's never been in before.

This is a mortifying realization. It takes two cups of coffee to drown it in jitters and the better part of an afternoon leafing through Carlos' hand-me-down comic books to give it enough fuel to push him out of the house and on a walk—roll, he has to remind himself—out of the house, and it's almost three o'clock in the afternoon when Mikey dredges himself from the Ramon household.

The parkway off Willow and Delaney is a block south of the Ramon household, and it has a long, dusty sidewalk set through the middle of it which dies off another block east, but that continues for a good ten blocks or so west.

So Mikey heads west on the sidewalk, letting the scent of summer chamomile and engine fluids guide him. The sun filters through his hair and eyelashes bright and heady and gives him a headache by the time he's three blocks out and he's feeling less and less like this was a good idea when a new smell assaults his nose. It's not quite bitter, and not quite acrid, but it nearly turns his stomach and then there's force on his wheelchair and Mikey tries to say something but nothing really comes out except a half-squeaked “woah!”.

“Surprise, wheelieboy,” says the voice in his ear. The sweet smoke he smelled earlier curls around Mikey's nose. He almost coughs but instead splutters, puts on a sugar-sweet smile and turns his head to look at the dark haired boy who's leaned his weight against Mikey's chair. He has eyes darker than Carlos', black the whole way through. He has a hard jaw dusted light in a beard and his bone structure screams Asian, but Mikey can't identify from where.

“You're a fucking asshole,” Mikey says, the smile unwavering.

“Oh come on. You can't just make snap judgements like that.” He returns the smile and takes a long drag off the cigarette in his fingers before blowing the smoke in Mikey's face.

“My name's Jake,” he continues, “You want a cigarette, kid? You look stressed.”

“My name's Mikey and I'm like eleven,” Mikey points out.

“So?” Jake says while he holds out a pack of marlboro golds in Mikey's direction. It only takes two moments of hesitation Mikey takes them with shaking fingers and pulls one out. The tobacco smell is worse straight out of the pack and it takes an iron will to stick it between his teeth and look up at Jake expectantly. Jake leans over him, clicking a lighter into life and holding it at the tip of Mikey's cigarette.

“Suck,” Jake hisses in his ear and Mikey sucks in air through the cigarette and comes away coughing before pulling the cigarette from his mouth in two fingers like he's seen on TV. It's a long moment while both of them look at each other before they mirror each other and hold the cigarettes to their lips again.

“So what's eating you, wheelieboy?” Jake asks from behind the cigarette and Mikey shakes his head, leaning to the left, resting on his arm. The smoke is heady. It makes his nerve endings tingle. Jake sits down in front of Mikey's chair, smoke pluming from his lips like a dragon while he looks up at the golden-grey sky. There's a long, gentle scar from where his jaw curves up into his ear to where his neck meets the dip in his clavicle. When Mikey doesn't answer his question he turns to cock his head and then shrug, examining the scar from a slightly better angle, absentminded.

“Fine. Where are you from? You don't look like a Rhode Island kid. The small state life doesn't seem like your beat.”

Mikey points back the direction he came from. He's not sure why. You're not supposed to tell strangers where you live but he has the niggling feeling that this stranger couldn't hurt him if he tried. There's something a lot more fragile than this boy is letting on just below the surface. If Mikey knows anything, Mikey knows fake smiles and how to detect them. He has a feeling it wouldn't take much to make this boy crumple, just the know-how. But he has no interest in doing that, right now he just wants to watch his dark eyes and the smoke dancing off his tongue.

“Born and raised here,” he settles on after a short deliberation.

“Man, really? I'm from Manhattan. You look like a city kid. You'd like the city, kid,” and he cackles with his little play on cadences and Mikey can't help but curl a genuine smile around the filter in his mouth.

“How old are you?” Mikey asks.

“That's for me to know and you to find out,” Jake says with a wink. He stands then, stretches and looks down at Mikey.

“I'm way too old for hanging around with, like, eleven year olds, though. Call me when you're, like, fifteen and you've figured out how much you like dick, Mikey, I'll be happy to suck yours. Enjoy the nicotine.”

Mikey sits there, confused and uncertain of what to make of all that until the filter in his cigarette singes his fingers and he has to run them through the closest chamomile rushes to try to rid them of the smell of smoke.

He's not quite sure if that was a battle won or lost but this life is certainly becoming a war. The calendar is still marking casualties and Mikey knows he has to start realizing who he wants to keep safe, and who can't be allowed around them.

 


End file.
